Year: 2011

I wrote some programs to go through 6 GB of OpenStreetMap data from http://metro.teczno.com so that I could extract a list of street names for an upcoming game project. The game will use procedural generation to create cities, so I need to have a dataset of street names but couldn't easily find one. So I've created this one and wanted to share it.

I did a lot of tweaking to remove duplicates. Each street name is on its own line, and you can just add "Rd", "St", "Ln", "Ave", "Blvd", "Pkwy" or any other suffix to the end of it. The zip file has a file of street names from each city, and then an allstreets.txt that has all of them combined into one file (with duplicates removed). Streets with numbers have been removed (there is no "7th" but there might be "Seventh").

The street data comes from Boston, Chicago, Leeds, London, Manchester, St. Paul, New York, Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, Sydney, and DC, so you can expect that they mostly have Anglo names.

Then after looking at the data for a while, I realized that these could also be used for Anglo last names. I've removed any words that appear in a dictionary file I have, so some common last names like "Smith" or "Hunting" won't show up. I would consider this list of moderate quality. Here's the list:

The Caesar Cipher Wheel is a paper cutout that can be used to perform encryption and decryption in the Caesar Cipher. However, if you don't have a printer but do have Python and Pygame installed, you can use this Caesar Cipher Wheel program to rotate a virtual cipher disk instead.

Pygcurse (pronounced "pig curse") is a curses library emulator that runs on top of the Pygame framework. It provides an easy way to create text adventures, roguelikes, and console-style applications. The mascot of Pygcurse is a blue pig with a skull tattoo on its butt.

The emphasis is on "rough" and "incomplete", but I thought it would be better to give a preview of the direction I was going. These books are also available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license like the first "Invent with Python" book.

The Code Breaker book is aimed at complete beginners who have never programmed before, and as such has a lot of the same content as Invent with Python. It covers various encryption programs, and also how to write programs that can break encryption. (It's an intro to programming and cryptography at the same time.)

The Pygame book is aimed at people who have read the first book or have a moderate amount of Python experience, and want to learn how to use the Pygame library to make graphical games. So far, the book really only has the source code for the games that will be in the book (these are the same programs that have been featured on this blog before.)

Hope you enjoy them. Feel free to send any ideas on content or presentation to me (don't bother with typos and such, these are incomplete drafts and those are probably known issues.) [email protected]